Join SIVB for our first in a new webinar series entitled: A Closer Look: Learning from the Past - Considering the Future." On April 28, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern (Noon Central, 11:00 a.m. Mountain, 10:00 a.m. Pacific), Stanton Gelvin from the Department of Biological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana will speak on "Plant genes important for T-DNA trafficking and integration in plant cells." 

Registration is free for SIVB members and $25 for nonmembers. 

Agrobacterium-mediated plant genetic transformation is a core technology for basic plant science and for the agricultural biotechnology industry.  More than 40 years of intensive research has given us a good, if not complete, understanding of early transformation events that occur within the bacterium.  This understanding has guided the research community in generating novel Agrobacterium strains with increased virulence.  However, many plant species, or particular varieties/cultivars, remain highly recalcitrant to Agrobacterium-mediated transformation.  To some extent, this recalcitrance is a tissue culture problem, but our understanding of the molecular events that occur in the plant cell, and plant genes/proteins contributing to transformation, lag far behind our knowledge of the events that occur within the bacterium.  For the past ~25 years, our laboratory has investigated transformation processes that occur within the plant cell.   Our emphasis has been on identifying plant proteins, often interacting with transferred Agrobacterium virulence (vir) effector proteins, that mediate T-strand cytoplasmic trafficking, nuclear entry, and integration into the plant genome.  In this webinar, I shall discuss our current knowledge of processes which occur within the plant cell that underlie successful transformation.  I shall emphasize our current understanding of how T-DNA integrates into plant chromosomes.